An Action Research On The Application Of Explicit Interactive Task Instruction In Senior Schools’ English Grammar Teaching

The purpose of this essay is to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of Explicit Interactive Task Instruction(or EITI)in English grammar teaching in senior high schools.Explicit interactive task instruction is a type of teaching approach that helps learners raise their conscious awareness to grammatical forms or structures of the target language,and at the same time,provide communicative activities,so as to improve their communicative competence.This paper intends to answer the following two questions:1)Can EITI enrich senior students’ explicit knowledge?2)Can EITI promote senior students’ mastery of grammar items and facilitate their autonomous learning?This action research employs experiment,questionnaires,interviews,observation and reflection instruments.The experiment applies EITI’s seven steps put forward by Dai Weidong&Ren Qingmei to English grammar teaching.And questionnaires are done both before and after the experiment.Interviews run through the experiment,whose subjects are six representatives chosen according to their English levels---good,middle and poor.Observation also runs through the entire process,most of which is made by the teacher of the learners.Both the teacher and students are required to reflect because the experiment itself is an action research and many issues surely will arise.Operational procedures are subject to adjustment.The results of interviews show that about 80%students hold positive attitude towards EITI;at least 75%students actively reflect on their problems and opinions and obvious improvement can be seen from the results of post-questionnaire.In addition,post-grammar test’s entire accuracy is above 80%;the accuracy of those three grammar items is above 90%in writing test and results of metalinguistic knowledge and untimed GTJ are improved.Before the experiment,by analyzing the composition finished in class,the author finds out and summarizes the most common mistakes made by students---subject-predicate agreement;the usage of the participle of Finite Verbs;the usage of "which" in attribute clauses.And then there are three rounds of action research on these three items about explicit interactive task instruction task.During the experiment,corresponding reflection and adjustment in next round are made after each round of the study.In the process of constant revision and adjustment,explicit interactive task instruction is applied better and flexibly in grammar teaching in senior high schools.Then,relevant post-tests are conducted including grammar tests,enrichment of explicit knowledge and learners’autonomous learning about those three grammar items.Finally,through the analysis of experimental data and questionnaires’ results,this study testifies the following research hypothesis:1)EITI can enrich senior schools students’ explicit knowledge.2)EITI can promote senior schools students’ mastery of grammar items and facilitate their autonomous learning.In general,explicit interactive tasks instruction opens a new door for English grammar teaching,which is an effective teaching approach.It is surely worth trying and promoting.